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Go is probably where it went mainstream in the current generation, yeah, but the idea has definitely been around for a while. The earliest implementation I kno
by iainmerrick 8y ago
Go is probably where it went mainstream in the current generation, yeah, but the idea has definitely been around for a while.
The earliest implementation I know of was COMAL, a very clean and tidy version of BASIC, I think dating from around 1980.
A lot of 80s micro BASICs did some level of auto-formatting purely as a side-effect of the source code being stored in tokenized form to save memory.
- jejones3141 8y agoA friend had COMAL on his C-64. It was very impressive. Microware Systems Corporation's BASIC09 from about the same time took the code you entered and converted it into "I-code". It's VM code, Jim, but not quite as we know it. The basic09 program didn't do the things we expect from IDEs now, but it did let you modify code etc., so its internal form reflected the BASIC09 statements and control structures rather than having lower-level branch and conditional branch instructions. That let it prettyprint your code with a consistent format when you listed it. (It also let it avoid the insane interpretation and symbol table lookup overhead of Microsoft BASICs of the era, inherited from the days when Altair BASIC had to run on a system with 4K of RAM.)